Usually, a discussion activity among group members provides a significant function for well solving problems currently encountered by combining and integrating diverse knowledge, different ideas and various perspectives into high quality decisions and innovations. On the contrary, group members can reach consensus and make better decision more easily through discussion activities. Basically, the discussion activity is essentially an information sharing and integrating process. Group members who involve in a discussion activity usually retrieve the discussion topic and analyze it in their minds by utilizing their specialized background knowledge. They provide different comments and suggestions for the discussion topic, enumerate evidence to support their opinions and try to unify other opinions to make a final conclusion regarding to the discussion topic.
In general, during a regular discussion process, several problems will raise which influence the quality of final conclusion. There are also challenges that sometimes obstruct the successful rate of solving the discussed issue if the issue were not addressed carefully. The challenges to proceed an effective discussion are listed as follows:
(1) Participants cannot definitely express what they are actually thinking. Gaps always exist between the mental ideas and the way they have been actually expressed. It is even worse for a communication among participants from different technical fields. Consequently, it is apparent that each participant spends a lot of time trying to understand each other, explains project information to the other and is incapable of leveraging information to support decision-making and solve problems.
(2) It is also a major problem in lack of an integrated platform and an appropriate media for facilitating interactions among participants from different technical fields or organizations. The discussion only based on the paper documentation is not enough to fully and clearly express the complicated and sophisticated information nowadays, but there exists only quite a few supporting tools nowadays to share relevant information easily and flexibly and no systematical or intuitive visualization tools effective enough to reduce communication misunderstanding.
(3) The opinions raised in the discussion may be diverged depending on how much each participant understands the discussion topic. It also causes too much irrelevant information beyond some participants' concern still being significantly emphasized during the discussion.
In particular, a discussion process is even more complicated for any on-site construction in civil engineering field. A construction site layout planning (CSLP) needs many experts from different disciplines to work to obtain her to make decisions and solve problems. For a long time, the construction site layout planning is considered as a critical part in construction planning by practitioners, inventors and researchers. A good on-site layout planning can increase the productivity for the construction activities, improve safety and avoid obstructing materials and equipment movements in the construction site. Unfortunately, there are few efforts regarding exploring the interaction of onsite information with the field crew.
A project manager has to call several brief meetings regarding the construction plan and progress every day and schedule and coordinate daily activities among different contractors and workers in order to control the construction machinery and to improve the safety and productivity of construction. The conventional meeting flow is as follows: every sub-contractor provides their construction plans, such as the schedule to the working items they take, the moving path of their equipments and so on, to the site director in paper format. The site director makes a feasible integration and arrangement according to every sub-contractor's plan. However, the traditional approach becomes ineffective and is prone to create errors because only the experienced and well-trained planners are able to generate the effective layout design with paper script. Observations of the project meetings reveal that communicating project information through paper-based graphical representations limits the team's ability to solve problems and make decisions. Since there is so much information, such as the diagrams and detailed schedules, the team requires and refers to during the meeting, it is hard for the team to focus on the same issue.
Despite the advancement in computer-aided engineering technology for civil engineering construction which can be used for helping planners in their decision-making process by allowing them to express various scenarios by taking several interrelated factors into consideration for site layout and path finding, there remains a lack of multi-disciplinary and multi-organizational discussion environment that can assist project teams in formulating this plan. However, site planners who have a key role in the site management currently rely mainly on their experience and intuition when considering the allocations of paths for logistics, vehicles, and site operatives.
In response to the current challenge of discussion activity, it is necessary to create an effective discussion platform that distinguishes and provides an intuitive user interface to help communications and interactions among different participants. Information interaction approaches can increase the visibility and readability of information so users can browse, and diagnose problems from the information effectively. Therefore, the present invention provides a discussion environment to provide a more intuitive cooperation and communication approach, to decrease the possibility of construction conflicts, help engineers to improve site layout discussion and in particular, information sharing and interaction.
It is therefore attempted by the applicant to deal with the above situation encountered in the prior art.